OK, you have completed a successful pilot BPM project and your organization is now committed to a major enterprise BPM initiative.  There are many steps you need to undertake now, too many for a single article such as this, but in this article we will explore one which is often overlooked.   The BPM industry, both tool vendors and consultants, like to talk about how much simpler it is to develop solutions with BPM than with traditional programming tools.  While this is certainly true, too many organizations interpret this as license to short-cut the disciplines which they have found to be necessary in all other forms of solution development.  This article will discuss the importance of modeling standards, provide guidelines on how to develop appropriate standards and perhaps most important how to make them an integral part of your process.

Requirements gathering should be done mindfully. Then there is this world we are living in, which requires agility, right? Well, can mindfulness and agile be imagined together? Once you can imagine this your requirements will be solid and done right, and you will obtain agility. Your sign-offs will be also achieved smoothly. It won’t stop there. Development, unit testing, functional testing and UAT will be smooth as well, including your org readiness efforts, along with your usage uptake and learning experience. Does this sound like it is out of this world, or in Utopia as most of us know this is not a very easy thing to achieve?

In the last twenty years we have become very good at mapping and improving processes; but we still have poorly structured organizations. Can we use our understanding of processes to improve organization design? A process exists to deliver a positive outcome to a customer or beneficiary. Sometimes the beneficiary is the person who does the work, as when you make a cup of coffee for yourself. But most processes in organizations exist to do something of value for an external or internal customer, who is not the person doing the work. This principle, deliver value to the customer, lies behind one of the great developments in process work – Lean. By analysing a process with a focus on what is needed to deliver value to the customer and eliminating everything that is not needed, a process becomes Lean. But Lean tells us little about how the work and people involved in delivering the process should be structured into an organization. So let me try to make a connection.